HydroBOT: an integrated toolkit for assessment of hydrology-dependent outcomes

Abstract

Water management rarely focuses only on water; instead, management targets values across many water-dependent responses. To assess past performance and plan future actions, water managers need to understand how changes to hydrology (over which they typically have most control) affect water-dependent values. Models relating values to hydrology can be difficult to integrate into management processes; they are often developed for other uses and target subsets of values. We describe and demonstrate HydroBOT (Hydrology-dependent Basin Outcomes Toolkit), a modeling toolkit co-designed with the primary federal water management agency in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. HydroBOT can integrate disparate response models and scale and synthesize those results across space, time, and groups of values. Outputs target water management needs and can be tailored to a range of questions, from local, short-term evaluation to basin-scale climate assessment. HydroBOT provides new capacity to move beyond hydrology to assess outcomes across diverse target values.